I loathe tobacco companies.
Did you know there was a time when tobacco companies owned almost all of the food brands you can think of in America? It was during their time of “diversification” in the late ‘80s and ‘90s and early ‘00s probably because they knew they were going to have to weather the storm of decades of lying about the safety of their main product.
Kraft, Nabisco, Post, General Mills - all were owned by either Phillip Morris or R.J. Reynolds. Phillip Morris even went to the trouble of changing their overall corporate name to Altria in the vain attempt of a cosmetic makeover. I can hear the spinmeisters in the corporate boardrooms, “yeah, we’ll combine altruism with nutrition or nutrients. No one will know the difference!”
I asked my employees to boycott their products throughout that time period (when they were purchasing food for river trips) and I have done the same personally up to this very day. However, doing a very cursory bit of “research”, I’ve discovered that Big Tobacco no longer has its claws in America’s food basket. Nowadays, it looks like they are more interested in vaping and weed, and, of course, continuing to addict as many people as possible on the nicotine imbedded in their number one product.
If not Americans, than users abroad.
It was during the Clinton Administration the U.S. Tobacco manufacturers faced and lost a racketeering lawsuit for having misled the American public about the dangers of smoking. The lawsuit was for approximately $250 billion and, oddly enough, originated out of Mississippi. The attorney general of Mississippi at the time, Mike Moore (who I hope is a distant relative), led the charge.
This was about the time that smoking in public became the equivalent of picking your nose in public. Bans went into effect nationwide. They had been building for decades but the racketeering lawsuit against Big Tobacco galvanized non-smoking activists everywhere.
Both of my parents smoked when I was a child. My father quit some time in the turbulent ‘60s. My mom never did. She did try to hide it from us for a while. But, for various personal reasons, she struggled to kick her addiction.
She succumbed to lung cancer in 1989.
I’d have to ask my oldest siblings but, if I had to guess, both my mom and dad smoked from the day I was born. I don’t have any memory of it when I was really young but I have vivid memories of choking on secondhand smoke while riding in the backseat during long road trips to parts of the country where you relied on the vehicle’s air conditioning to keep from dissolving in a pool of sweat.
In my mind, that was the equivalent of torture. And I don’t remember giving them a hard time about it but, at some point, I don’t see how my brother, Bill, or sister, Susie, and I did not speak up. We had to have whined and harassed them some.
One method people used to use to break their kids from smoking was to have them smoke an entire pack or two in one sitting. There was no need for that for me. As a result of enduring those long rides in smoke-filled cars, I never once tried smoking.
Anything.
The idea of smoking makes me want to vomit. I can’t even pick up a cigarette. Everything about it grosses me out.
I attribute some of my cigarette-loathing nature to a stupid game I remember playing when I was four or five. (But, honestly, this may be one of those ‘false memories’ that become mythological over time). The game was you closed your eyes and your friend would put something in your mouth and you’d have to guess what it was. My friend put a cigarette butt he found on the driveway in my mouth. I immediately spat it out and very nearly puked.
In high school, I had one date with a very attractive blonde who was going into modeling but when I kissed her good night her mouth tasted like it had been used as an ashtray. That was the first and last time we kissed and may have been the last time I spoke with her, except in passing.
Why am I railing about smoking now? Because it sure seems like the battle has been fought and won as far as cigarettes in our culture goes.
You can’t smoke in bars and restaurants.
You can’t smoke on planes.
You can’t smoke in any public venues.
Smokers - of traditional cancer sticks anyway - have to slink away in just about every public setting, even when it is outside.
I am up in arms, once again, because, from what I can tell, Hollywood is doing all it can to make smoking glamorous again. During the height of the Great Awakening about smoking and secondhand smoke, Hollywood excised smoking whenever it was not really necessary for the plot. For instance, it’s quite understandable why you would have practically everyone smoking in the television series Mad Men. It was set in the ‘50s and ‘60s in the high-stress world of Madison Avenue advertising - and like my parents - everyone was smoking.
But there are shows set in the 21st century where the reality could easily be absolutely no one smoking and, yet, there’s the beloved protagonist or heroine lighting up. And lighting up. And lighting up.
Because they aren’t just smokers, they’re chain smokers!
What I think is happening is that the tobacco companies, who have been banned from advertising for decades, are bankrolling Hollywood. After all, product placement happens in all forms of media, including books. Authors, like Danielle Steele, accept payment to mention products in their novels. I can’t see a brand name in a novel without wondering whether the author was paid to mention it.
(Did you know that Apple will not allow Hollywood producers and film makers from putting their products in the hands of the “bad guys”? Thus the bad guys are always using Dells and Samsungs and it’s a dead giveaway if you are trying to figure out whodunnit.)
For the record, I don’t think it will ignite a renaissance of smoking but it won’t be from a lack of trying.
Also, for the record, the same propagandists who aided and abetted Big Tobacco throughout the 20th century and got their “wings” during the Second World War in military intelligence, are the propagandists, or the direct descendants of the propagandists, leading the charge on climate change denial.
But that’s a rant for another day.
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Michael just beat me to that comment.
Need to hire that editor. . .